Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday September 25, 2011 @05:11PM
from the what-is-to-be dept.

bLanark writes "A fascinating article from Singularity Hub describes software which, when fed news, makes predictions about forthcoming events. When given information on recent events, it spiked before the Egyptian and Libyan uprisings. It uses various sources including the News Bank which is a database of global news."

Moyers: What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if population growth continues at its present rate?

Asimov: It will be completely destroyed. I will use what I call my bathroom metaphor. Two people live in an apartment and there are two bathrooms, then both have the freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want, and stay as long as you want, for whatever you need. Everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution. But if

Asimov wasn't alone. Several authors have put forth the concept (my favorite is actually "Cleology", introduced in "In the Country of the Blind" by Michael Flynn [wikipedia.org], complete with some graphs and charts of historical cyclical data that projected (at the time of the book's writing) future events that have turned out to be surprisingly accurate (at the time of this writing)).

The entire concept of studying history can be summed up in the phrase "Those who do not recall history are doomed to repeat it" - in other

Asimov wasn't alone. Several authors have put forth the concept (my favorite is actually "Cleology", introduced in "In the Country of the Blind" by Michael Flynn [wikipedia.org], complete with some graphs and charts of historical cyclical data that projected (at the time of the book's writing) future events that have turned out to be surprisingly accurate (at the time of this writing)).

The entire concept of studying history can be summed up in the phrase "Those who do not recall history are doomed to repeat it" - in other words, we need to know what mistakes we have made in order to avoid making them again.

My favorite is Melchizedek from Battle Angel Alita [wikipedia.org] by Yukito Kishiro [wikipedia.org]. Melchizedek is an MBC that can predict trends from arbitrary datasets. At first it is used for weather forecasting, but as time progresses the system is tasked with making predictions from other data. Soon it is monitoring economic, political, and criminal trends, and every decision made by human administrators is first run by Melchizedek to see if the predicted outcome is favorable. Eventually the entire government is turned over to Melc

Knowing one's destiny is not a curse. It's knowing one's destiny, and being unable to change it that is (especially if it's a bad one). There's probably a nasty equation we'll find out where peering into the future collapses all possible futures down to one, the one you just observed, and it's always the worst one out of all of them.

Well if you are a homophobic troll the chances are that you are looking forward to it because the simple fact is that the more homophobic you are the more likely you are to get an erection watching gay porn.

If I recall correctly, one of the postulates of Foundation was that the general populace should not be aware of the existence of the prediction mechanism, or it would fail in its purpose. Also, the groups of people whose actions were being predicted was so large that an individual person's actions should have little bearing on the results.

This concept has been summed up quite well by Agent K in Men In Black:"A person is smart. People are stupid, panicky animals... and you know it."

It's much easier to look for spikes or what your data looks like *after* an important event has taken place, than to actually predict them. I'm sure that even if I look at my computer logs on a significant date, there's most likely something there that I would class as interesting or out of the ordinary, in hindsight, too...

i agree, hindsight makes this sort of prediction look a lot easier than it actually is. But it also wouldn't surprise me if there was a flair-up of news (or particular type of news) that sets a pre-cursor to the naked ape ignoring authority. So definantly worth the effort, but I wouldn't be holding my breath for an accurate prediction system that's better than even a basic application of common sense just yet.

The obvious question that wasn't in TFA was - did they go back and look at other 'spikes' to see if they meant anything? From the article, the whole process seemed pretty weak intellectually - in the weeks leading up to Mubarak's fall it was clear to anyone with an IQ higher than a typical US politician^Hsnail that something was going to happen - either Mubarak was going to get canned or a lot of Egyptians were going to get in a shitload of trouble.

> did they go back and look at other 'spikes' to see if they meant anything?

Even that won't necessarily work. You can't predict the future of share prices by using past data. You can perfectly predict events that have already happened using earlier events, but that doesn't mean it'll work for future data/events.

Yes, revolutions are going to happen in fucked up/unfair countries, not ones which are stable and sensible. So, Denmark: no, Egypt: possibly, who knows/cares?

No, but you can make a fairly-accurate educated guess about the price of Company X's share price tomorrow, based on the news today. The main issue about attempting to predict the future based on history is to know enough about the effect you are attempting to predict to understand its causes, and therefore be able to accurately detect the symptoms in time to react to them appropriately.

Of course, if we're detecting revolutions, then a fascist state would simply jail or otherwise dispose of anyone who perfor

it is normal scientific work to test simulators by feeding them with true data up to some date in the past and look if their simulation up to current date is accurate. i have not RTFA, but there is nothing odd in the (short) summary here to me...

Great point--I wish they had more details about the methodology. I wonder if they're backtesting against the same historical news data that they used to create the model. That would be a big mistake--the model would perform terrifically well against the same data used to create it, causing overconfidence.

Interesting project, but their predictions exit their scope of possible indicators. For instance, natural disasters don't have societal indicators.

As for the stock market, it has defied analysis for as long as it has existed... although that may very well be due to interested parties acting upon potentially accurate predictions and skewing the anticipated actions, thus invalidating the predictions.

Call me back when they can accurately and reliably tell me whether it will rain next Tuesday.

If you want to know what Ure is doing, you can pretty much copy-paste his name on the report and roll all the dates in the report back about a decade.

It would be much like the reaction if I wrote my own crappy homemade webserver this week, and then sent press releases to the entire universe explaining how I just wrote the worlds first webserver and not only that but its also the worlds first open source webserver and carefully avoid mentioning any prior art.

Predictive software, in itself, hasn't been an "idea" for a long time. The very first "real" computer application was churning out ballistics trajectory tables, which is itself prediction (albeit based on laws that are well-understood, or at least repeatable). Weather forecasting is obviously predictive. All automated stock-market trading software is predictive.

Having the idea is trivial. Actually making it work is the ENTIRE matter.

All prediction is based on nothing more than the assumption that the universe has fixed laws of cause and effect that will not change in the future. More complex predictions require more inputs and more cause/effect rules, but they're still the same thing.

Except that while TFA is simply obvious hindsight science (with an unimpressive graph) the site you linked to is taking seriously somone managing web crawling bots who predictis some kind of vague doomsday in ~72 hours (such that the manager has been saying goodbye to friends), and who also predicted that summer 2010 there would be floods of US refugees heading to Canada and has made many such (failed) predictions repeatedly.

Real internet crackpots. Almost as funny as the guys trying to correlate random num

...we will see martial law declared preemptively, military and police forces will start flooding areas before anything can happen, and people who the computer says will be key figures in the revolution will be preemptively jailed and/or executed.

Don't get your hopes up, kids. This isn't the Foundation, and it won't be used to save civilization, it will be used to keep people already in power from even having a chance of losing that power. If you haven't noticed, the folks running the show think the only value of civilization is that it gives them a system within which to gain power and wealth.

...we will see martial law declared preemptively, military and police forces will start flooding areas before anything can happen, and people who the computer says will be key figures in the revolution will be preemptively jailed and/or executed.

... except that (according to most "psychohistory" proponents), the information you get is not that granular.

Also, declaring martial law and flooding the potential problem area with enforcers could be just what those fomenting rebellion are waiting for, to finally get the "little guy" involved in something that wasn't (up to that point) affecting him.

...we will see martial law declared preemptively, military and police forces will start flooding areas before anything can happen, and people who the computer says will be key figures in the revolution will be preemptively jailed and/or executed.

... except that (according to most "psychohistory" proponents), the information you get is not that granular.

Also, declaring martial law and flooding the potential problem area with enforcers could be just what those fomenting rebellion are waiting for, to finally get the "little guy" involved in something that wasn't (up to that point) affecting him.

"No, you can't go outside, they'll shoot you."
"Oh, yeah? Watch me."

It doesn't work quite like that. For people to remain gathered against the government they must at least have the expectation of success.
Unarmed people will not continue to demonstrate for long in a square where the army has no problem shooting to kill. You can see that with Tiananmen square, the failed rebellions in Myanman in 1988 and 2007 and the one this year in Bahrein for ex. Wherever the army is willing to kill the protesters the state wins. And from that you can safely conclude that the only place

... and if the first guy to go outside and spit on the newly-drawn battle lines get shot, the next ones to come out might be carrying (and aiming and firing) weapons.

This is somewhat similar in basic concept to "You don't have to outrun the dragon, you just have to outrun the halfling," assuming you convinced the halfling to go into the dragon's den in the first place.

... and if the first guy to go outside and spit on the newly-drawn battle lines get shot, the next ones to come out might be carrying (and aiming and firing) weapons.

This is somewhat similar in basic concept to "You don't have to outrun the dragon, you just have to outrun the halfling," assuming you convinced the halfling to go into the dragon's den in the first place.

Yeah. Which is why most states ban people from owning weapons.:) Even the US keeps trying to do that and limiting as much as possible gun ownership with licenses and restrictions. You can be sure it has nothing to do with public safety: the last thing any politician cares about is the public.

Hence the 2nd amendment. Folks, it's not there to protect us from things that go bump in the night. It's to protect the citizens from thier governement. There are MILLIONS of handguns alone in the country, shotguns, rifles everywhere. "Wherever the army is willing to kill the *UNARMED* protesters the state wins. " Libya.

Hence the 2nd amendment. Folks, it's not there to protect us from things that go bump in the night. It's to protect the citizens from thier governement. There are MILLIONS of handguns alone in the country, shotguns, rifles everywhere. "Wherever the army is willing to kill the *UNARMED* protesters the state wins. " Libya.

True, but if you're giving Libya as an example of the armed people successfully resisting government oppression I have to disagree with that. That's only another CIA opperation to justify invasion. The "peaceful" "protesters" were from the start armed insurgents initiating all the violence for political gain, not rights. Before NATO started destroying the place Libya had the highest standard of living in Africa and therefore would be the last country on that continent vulnerable to any genuine rebellion.

Of course we don't need a supercomputer for that. Plenty of humans were able to see the signs of that coming months or even years ahead of time -- PBS specials on the evil Taliban. Bush administration officials being told the number one priority was war with Saddam. Build up of the National Guard. Bankers being told not to go to work at the WTC. Unocal pipeline plans. Hell, John McLaughlin predicted it nearly to the exact month, ten years beforehan

I'd love for some of youright wing retards to spend a bit of time in a genuinely oppressive regime, then maybe you'd stop thinking that having to pay tax was the moral equivalent of being tortured to death for reading the wrong newspaper.

How would you go about compensating for the impact of using the generated data as the basis for massive amounts of trading?How do you compensate for competing predictive engines, doing the same thing with the same data but using different algorithms?

The problem with attempting to utilize a predictive system to influence a decision is that acting on the predicted outcome changes the outcome, invalidating the prediction.

But CNN told me we just need to check facebook for the latest revolution. They and all the other main news sources did endless interviews of people from Egypt who were naming their children facebook in honor of their revolutions.

If 2010 taught us anything, it is that no revolution, ever, anywhere, happened without facebook. All hail facebook and its indisputable power to bring about justice and peace!

What's a "revolution"? The revolts in Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Syria this year? How about the people who have been "occupying" Wall Street the past week? Does getting maced by the cops for no reason at all [dailykos.com] make a revolt a revolution?

If it's people demonstrating against the system overseas, they're revolutionaries and brave freedom fighters. If they do it in your own country they're trouble-making hippies and anarchists who don't wash and have probably not done a decent day's work in their lives.

YOu know I was really hoping the protests in Wall Street would be as bad as the ones for the WTO and Greece. It turns out they are not or the free speech zones are too far away from Wall Street where no one with cameras can hear

They didn't mention any of those countries. Doesn't seem very good to me....

I have noticed that similar nations tend to move the same way (sounds obvious), All the Baathist systems are dying in the ME.

Even in the west, all the democratic nations are facing strange "historic" electoral results. The US, Britain, Sweden, Australia and many other democratic countries have all had the equivalent of a 'hung parliament' and in the case of Sweden (were a 'hung parliament' is the norm) an outright swing to

Right now some very indirect methods are being used to predict the stock market. There seem to be happy words and sad or moody words. By studying conversations on the net for happy word and sad word content the market can be predicted more accurately than with any other method. As for people mouthing off about revolutions and dramatic actions during hard times they really need to moderate their words a bit before they get what they claim they w

As for people mouthing off about revolutions and dramatic actions during hard times they really need to moderate their words a bit before they get what they claim they want. Germany had a revolution and ended up with Hitler. Russia had a revolution and ended up with Stalin. Improvements in life tend to happen with orderly progress and orderly change. Revolutions usually simply do not work.

Mining news stories will only tell you what people already knew... Osama Bin Laden? If you asked any experts in the past decade where he was, the answer was always "Pakistan". Everyone assumed he was in the tribal areas, and were wrong. In hindsight, it's easy to say they were within X km, but that information also ceases to be useful in hindsight...

Anyhow, this story isn't a complete waste. It segues nicely into a different story from PRI a couple months ago, which DOES make predictions. It is based on weather, and specifically predicts how many politically unstable countries are likely to experience "violence" (an uprising) in a given year:

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting downbrothers in the instant replay.There will be no pictures of pigs shooting downbrothers in the instant replay.There will be no pictures of Whitney Young beingrun out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.There will be no slow motion or still life of RoyWilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black andGreen liberation jumpsuit that he had been savingFor just the proper occasion.

Seriously though, these things are impossible to predict, so far, because the

The system will never predict anything bad happening here. Between the fact that our media spoon-feeds us whatever their version of events are and that we are all more than happy to sit back and eat whatever bowl of (expletive deleted) our corporate overlords feed us, there will never be anything to predict.

The Tea Party members of congress mostly signed a fealty pledge to Grover Norquist not to raise taxes no matter what.

That became pretty well a litmus test for all republicans. I am not aware of a single republican in congress who did not sign the pledge, and for that matter several "blue-dog" democrats have signed it as well. I thank you for using the work fealty to describe the pledge, as it is very much a religious oath to many of the members.

You can't sign a pledge of that nature which has the effect of subverting democracy and expect to get away with it.

Well, the Tea Party - and many of their GOP colleagues - view the government as acting in violation of the constitution on which it is based. Hence they see themselves as comm

Probably because she runs a business with her husband. She also administered a farm that was owned by her father-in-law. I'm surprised you didn't hear about all the claims from the left that somehow that farm should have run without subsidy-- nearly impossible, thanks to the farm economy the government created in the New Deal-- because Bachmann is a conservative. Anyway, saying she's never had a non-government job is lying through omission.

Anyway, saying she's never had a non-government job is lying through omission.

Can you point to a single job she's ever held, or a single paycheck she's ever received, that was not made possible by the government? She is in the camp that repeatedly shouts from the highest mountain that the government cannot create jobs, yet I am not aware of a single job she has ever had that was not created or heavily supplemented by the government.

There is no lie there based on any amount of information I have ever seen. If you have information that I have not seen, please share it and I will t

Why was he modded down? What he says is true. A small minority forced the majority to sign a pledge to submit the voters they represent. That should be illegal as the constitution is who they should pledge too and look at for their citizens

Sedition
1. incitement of discontent or rebellion against a government.
2. any action, especially in speech or writing, promoting such discontent or rebellion.
3. Archaic . rebellious disorder.
1: Tea party folks or democrats that have signed the pledge are involved in the process doing nothing illegal. They were voted in by the folks they govern.
2: Maybe this is where your coming from, it's the closest I can come. Poverty (as defined in the US) is way up. Our current jails hold 2.5 million people. T